late winter / early spring reads

Michelle Tea is a queer, feminist writer whom I read a lot of when I researching the Tegan & Sara musical that was not to be. Bought her new novel about the apocalypse (but also SF at around the millenium) at Spoonbill in December. Read it one afternoon in March - it was fun and kind of vulgar and definitely gives a sense of Tea as as writer in a good way. 

Reread The Westing Game - a book I loved as a kid for a possible adaptation that I have a call about in an hour. 

I loved The Mare - couldn't put down while I was reading it and it almost made me late for a commitment. Was considering trying to keep reading on my walk there, but eventually put down to rush home to the last ten pages after. Put me back on a Mary Gaitskill kick - even though I've already read everything. Bought Somebody With a Little Hammer (Gaitskill's new collection of Essays) the day it came out and am reading those now. Also The Mare reminded me in parts of Aryn Kyle's The God of Animals - which is another novel I should look into rights for.

Adam and I spent the weekend upstate for our anniversary and on train home as we were going through all those Hudson Valley towns we circled the "upstate" convo (he's pro, I'm against). Then we came home and he re-potted all our plants. But instead of helping I just started reading the review of The Arrangement that was peaking out of the part of the Times we were using to cover the floor. It's written by a TV Comedy writer who lives upstate with her husband - so I read it the next day as a way of potentially peeking into the future and (in what Adam would not unjustly call an unfair way, since this is fiction and we are different people) it just further reinforced my fear of ever moving there.  

I had been searching for Hangover Square since I read Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and finally found it (all over the place) when I went to London this winter. (I never seem the read the books I order from Amazon as much as I do the ones I have the joy of "finding" so often will wait it out). This was another quick read and enjoyed it but not as much as TTSUTS although I wonder if it had more to do with reading that one first and being so impressed by Hamilton's voice as a newcomer to it. Whereas here it was more of the (excellent) same. But what I was expecting? Either way, it's great.

To speak to the above - I ordered Jessica Mitford's second Autobiography, A Fine Old Conflict and Diana Mitford's A Life of Contrasts on Amazon. Both I am sure are better books than this one. But I was so surprised to find Diana Alexander's bio of Pam, The Other Mitford in a shop that I read it cover to cover (even though it's pretty terribly written and I already knew almost everything covered) and those other two are still sitting on my shelf, unread.